A new (to me, IAC) spelling rule

[Robin Hamilton]

The problematics around this issue might be summed up thus:

        All flies are bugs but not all bugs are flies.

It seems that the NYT pontificators aren't so much wrong as under-informed.

(Caveat around the following -- I'm currently cut off from the OED and have
had to use the Shorter OED, so the following is by no means bulletproof.)

Bug (thus "bugbear") was originally (14thC) a boggle or beastie or creature
that went bump in the night.  [Exhaustively discussed in Irma Taavitsainen,
_Placing Middle English in context_, pp. 280ff.]  In 1622, a new meaning (or
meanings) emerge/s -- bug=insect, and bug=insect of the order Hemiptera
["true bug", among which are found bedbugs or bed bugs.]

Fly has an equally ambiguous (OE) origin, early on meaning both any winged
insect [thus dragonflies, butterflies, etc.,) as well as specifically a
two-winged insect of the order Diptera ["fly", sometimes "true fly", among
which are found house flies].

It seems to be the case that when specific reference is being made to the
entomological orders, the qualifier "true" is sometimes used to
disambiguate -- thus a "true bug" is an insect of the order Hemiptera, and a
"true fly" (a less common collocation), an insect of the order Diptera.

The two-words-or-one spelling assertion would seem to be a fuzzy reflex or
post-hoc rationalisation of the above.

Equally, a bug is any insect, while a fly is one of those nasty little
buggers that buzz around the house.

Naturally enough, when common usage intersects with etymological jargon,
there is confusion .

Robin
--------------------------------------------------
From: "Wilson Gray" <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
Sent: Wednesday, September 01, 2010 2:11 AM
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Subject:      Re: A new (to me, IAC) spelling rule

> ---------------------- Information from the mail
> header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: A new (to me, IAC) spelling rule
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 7:26 PM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu>
> wrote:
>> Wilson, if you can post the whole damn passage, why can't you tell us
>> where it came from?
>>
>
> <http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/wp-comments-post.php>
>
> It is or was the last comment on p.4 of the comments. There's an
> earlier instance to which the NYT replies that it used the Webster's
> New World Collegiate as its authority and notes that other comments
> making the same complaint have been received.
> --
> -Wilson

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